The Future Always Finds Us Changed

 

Misfortunes & blessings––they don’t account for what happens anymore than the way Xuan would never have hoped or feared if she’d been ready to understand. Birth is a nothing less than a miracle. Loss so final. The parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same story problem existing in a world where experience accumulates & vanishes like money. With nothing to reconcile, the loyalty she was loyal to––that girl––she was married to her. Xuan knew it without looking. Somehow she found her way to another who did not see what life had written upon her. All she had to do was pierce her ears, rouge her cheeks, pretend not to be indifferent to the worst & best that could possibly happen––even if she couldn’t say what that is, even if she thought of nothing else but the ferociousness of things so as to attempt to be prepared when they show themselves re-arranged in the now.

 

 

[Published in The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter: Expanded Edition.

© 2016 by Jim Cohn.]